Busted —

Feds indict AlphaBay’s alleged PR man

Ronald Wheeler accused of working for AlphaBay since 2015.

Enlarge/ Andrew McCabe (front), then US acting director of the FBI, attends a press conference at the Department of Justice on July 20, 2017. The world's then-largest "dark market" on the Internet, AlphaBay, was shut down, DOJ officials said on that date.

The hearing comes months after federal officials announced the closure of the site in July 2017 and confirmed the recent death of Canadian citizen Alexandre Cazes, who they said was the Thailand-based mastermind behind AlphaBay. At the time, authorities also distributed a criminal indictment against Cazes from the Eastern District of California on numerous conspiracy and drug trafficking charges.

Further Reading

A handful of other prosecutions against other AlphaBay-affiliated suspects nationwide are underway. Wheeler appeared in court and pleaded not guilty. He was released on bond, according to the AP.

Prosecutors said that Wheeler operated online under the names "Trappy" and "Trappy-Pandora." He is said to have served as AlphaBay’s "public relations specialist" beginning in May 2015, mediating sales disputes and promoting AlphaBay online, including on Reddit.

In August 2017, some users on /r/DarkNetMarkets believed that Trappy was "next to be busted."

Cyrus Farivar
Cyrus is a Senior Tech Policy Reporter at Ars Technica, and is also a radio producer and author. His latest book, Habeas Data, about the legal cases over the last 50 years that have had an outsized impact on surveillance and privacy law in America, is due out in May 2018 from Melville House. Emailcyrus.farivar@arstechnica.com//Twitter@cfarivar